New Amazon Linux Container Image Removes Branch from Decision Tree

By Flux7 Labs

November 17, 2016

AWS kicked off November with the announcement of a new Amazon Linux container image for cloud and on-premises workloads. As power users of AWS, EC2 and Docker, our AWS consultants are excited at this news; it will greatly ease the upfront planning process for clients, eliminating a dimension from the complex decision matrix we navigate designing a Docker-based setup in AWS.

At Flux7, our AWS consultants begin every engagement with a thorough assessment of our client’s objectives — both technical and business. We ask a lot of smart, thorough questions to ensure that the solution we design is custom-built to address these objectives to the utmost possible. In doing so, we walk our clients through our proprietary decision support framework that guides us as together we make the many important decisions needed when moving to AWS and Docker.

Prior to this news announcement, when we reached the design of Docker setups we had some difficult questions to pose and answer. The most pressing of which was OS selection. We have traditionally recommended AWS Linux for the Host for three reasons. Within Amazon, AWS Linux is a solid, “you can’t go wrong” choice because it:

Comes installed with AWS tools and the packages updates are available at a healthy frequency;

Has solid security features that are also updated regularly; and

Does not incur licensing costs.

While this answer is intuitive enough, once we moved past the Host OS question, the next question we asked our clients was which base image should be used for the Docker container. This follow-up question is where the wrinkles would surface as we would have to explain why the Host OS needed to be different because Amazon Linux did not have a Docker container. As a result, our customers would have to choose to run another base Linux image, such as CentOS, in AWS. With this new announcement, AWS has greatly streamlined this decision process as we can use the same OS for both the Host and Docker base image.

We are excited that AWS has removed this decision-making hurdle as the power of DevOps powered by AWS and Docker are clear. If you are interested in learning more about how we walk our clients through the process from assessment to design, implementation and knowledge transfer within an AWS and Docker-powered DevOps environment, please reach out to us today. Interested in getting tips, best practices and commentary delivered regularly? Click the button below to sign up for our blog.